(Ted Rall via GoComics.com)
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Doing some housekeeping & this turned up. As my Intro to Anthropology professor told us, it is a fact universally acknowledged that The Tribe Over There is full of lowlife degenerates who eat taboo foods, have sex with their relatives, worship false idols & use entirely too much of the common resources. All else is commentary…

Apart from the universal verities, what’s on the agenda for the evening?

…it is a fact universally acknowledged that The Tribe Over There is full of lowlife degenerates who eat taboo foods, have sex with their relatives, worship false idols & use entirely too much of the common resources.

In the interests of fairness and balance, I know one or two Jets fans who don’t eat taboo foods.

Packrat and I were having the usual weekend boredom with cooking the stuff we have all the time. We had frozen chicken breasts and spinach, so I googled around until I found a recipe that used both without requiring a store run for any other ingredients.

Pfft, everyone knows The Tribe at Balloon Juice is full of lowlife degenerates who eat taboo foods, have sex with their relatives, worship false idols & use entirely too much of the common resources. All else is commenters…

Well, L’ville has now taken the lead.
Not a very good sports day/night.
Overdog is ahead in the hoop (always root for the underdog).
Broons down 2-0 in Montreal, and looking like its gonna’ get a lot worse.
Sox got one-hit by an otherwise mediocre Toronto pitcher today. I am afraid it is an augury of the next six months.

OMG…Becky!!! GIJoe was sooooooo lame! The only saving grace was seeing The Rock in some serious tight military tees. I know steroids are bad for u, but damn when it comes to The Rock, they do a body good!

One of my favorite vignettes from Herodotus is when a Persian king (Darius or Xerxes, I can’t remember which) demonstrates the power of local custom–he asks some Greeks under what circumstances would they cook and eat the bodies of their deceased parents, and the Greeks reply they would never ever do that for any reason. Darius (in front of them both) then asks some Indians under what circumstances would the NOT cook and eat the bodies of their dead parents and they are equally horrified.

G. I. Joe in general is a pretty awful franchise, as is Transformers. (Feel free to skewer me, people who remember them fondly from childhood…)

However, awful franchises can still turn out movies that’re in the “so bad they’re good” range, which is how I ranked the last G. I. Joe. (The previous one, on the other hand, was just plain bad. IMHO, at least).

Dealing with one of those all-out viral assaults that makes you feel like you’re slightly out of phase with reality, although that could be the Dayquil as well. If I could just breath through my nose for ten minutes…it’s the little things in life.

Plus, did you know that he proved that socialist redistribution and big government (and liberal geometry!) both originated in Africa:

The priests also told me that Sesostris divided the country among all the Egyptians, giving each man the same amount of land in the form of a square plot. This was a source of income for him, because he ordered them to pay an annual tax. If any of a person’s plot was lost to the river, he would present himself at the king’s court and tell him what had happened; then the king sent inspectors to measure how much land he had lost, so that in the future the man had to pay proportionately less of the fixed tax. It seems to me that this was how geometry as a land-surveying technique came to be discovered and then imported into Greece.

@raven: That wasn’t a foul. The guy presented the ball and Hancock had two hands in there. The call could’ve went either way, call the jump ball or let it wrangle a second longer. Either way nobody should be thinking twice about it.

Whenever you’re done with it… here’s a fairly good review from a blogger I discovered recently about all the religious stuff in the movie – http://them0vieblog.com/2012/1.....at-beyond/ that you might find interesting. (I did. Though I wasn’t wowed by the movie overall either when I saw it).

Meh. The favorite won the first game, and I guess nobody much cares about two number fours in the other bracket.
Can’t speak for anyone else, but I’d like it much better if the broadcasters (hoop and f’bawl both) gave more credit to the skill and talent of the players, and less to the coaches.

@gene108: that wasn’t a quick whistle. completely typical call. made all year long. typical play, typical call.
The announcers said something about it being quick to gin something up and now every hater in the fucking country latched on to it like the second shooter theory.

Just got done with it a little while ago. It is a profoundly stupid movie, and I am flabbergasted that the Irish blogger Darren (a) wasted so much overwrought prose on its threadbare “religious” subtext and (b) rated it number 5 on his list of the year’s best movies. Ugh. I feel stupider for having watched it.

I’m still soaking in it. The Weyland Corporation apparently has worse security (and worse hiring practices) than a second-rate strip club, and for Dr. Shaw to be the lone survivor after fucking up every step of the way was a travesty. And what a total waste of Charlize Theron. I hope she was able to pay off the beach house or something.

Whatever you think about Ted Rall’s abilities as an artist/cartoonist, I remember listening to him on some LA radio station (KFI, I think) back in the day and he was always saying the ‘stan’s was where the shit was gonna go down.

He even led several bus tours through Central Asia for a some listeners who signed up for the ride. Well, you can read about it here!

eta: FYI, currently watching Airplane! on HBFw (whatever the hell that is). Just started on the left coast!

I’ve spent most of my adult life living and working in those funky countries. And in most of them, especially the larger countries with polyethnic populations, it’s not just the next country that’s perceived weird/alien, it’s the next province which might have a different ethnic group. Pakistan is actually a very good example of this but a lot of other countries, especially in Africa fall into this category.

However, the globalization phenomenon, specifically the Internet and global trade has reduced this xenophobic tendency somewhat, at least in coastal and other large cities. Still, it is pretty common and not likely going away anytime soon, since it is a part of our fundamental legacy (territoriality, family, clan).

@mainmati: True in India too. If you go from one state to another, even the language changes and if you are away from the metros or touristy areas, they don’t speak much English and if you are in the South, not much Hindi either. So it is hand gesture time..

My wife and I were on a far eastern trip in which we started in Thailand and then went to Vietnam. The Thais we mentioned this to universally gave us the same disgusted look a New Yorker would give you if you told him you were planning to spend the weekend in Newark.